Well, it was the Lunar New Year, last week, I think. It is the year of the Boar, and my boar stumbled in late to the party. Los Angeles had a big parade celebrating the New Year in China Town. It’s been raining for weeks, and the weather is unseasonably cool, but the skies turned blue for the dancing dragons and the big parade. As we walked towards the downtown area, we passed a group in kilts with bagpipes who had just finished their march on the parade route. There were school marching bands, and baton-twirlers, and local politicians riding in cars and waving.

I have been busy with my qualifying exams reading, which amounts to about six books a week, and I have not had much time for writing or even reading fiction. So, when I see the parade, I think of Confucius, strangely enough, and the significance he places on rites. Rites in the modern world, in America perhaps, are celebrations and mourning, like funerals, and maybe this parade. The cynical academic would call such rites “fraught with meaning”—”fraught” meant to convey a displeasure over gathering over something that is likely imperfect or lacking at some point in time or another. I don’t mean to say that there is a dark past to the parade in Chinatown. Just that when I saw the little children in the karate outfits or the middle-aged man with his bagpipe, I was filled with a sense of happiness that for some accident of the heaven bodies, some accident of history, we were all on this street celebrating together.

Despite being a fairly cynical person, actually, I feel the same way about Valentine’s Day. Married, dating, single, lost in some polyamorous triangle, happily or miserably—to treat oneself or a loved one to a chocolate lava cake, a card, a glass of wine, or a tableful of waffles, those are things worth doing. It is nice to have reasons to celebrate, even if they are merely “societal constructions” (what isn’t?) or a “corporate holiday” (so, what?).

To celebrate is to enjoy life, enjoy a moment with someone else. It is nice to have a reason to. Or, at least to do something peculiar on a certain day, that has its pleasures. I think I realized this and embraced holidays while in Japan when I realized that Mother’s Day was very much a very modern creation but it was embraced with such enthusiasm that I could not help but enjoy it too. I found myself smiling at the red carnations in the shop windows, the “traditional” flower to give on Mother’s Day or even the most rabidly commercial displays because it somehow felt like we were all celebrating something together, even if it were only by walking past carnations.

The old notebook for previous scene reference and the the character list in the new one. I always forget characters’ names. That doesn’t bode well.

In other news, I am officially on notebook three of Kabuki-ish. It is the novel that will not die, the story that will not shrink. I wouldn’t have it any other way, and I have completely given up on any kind of deadline. It is okay, I whispered to myself as I stood in the bookshop, purchasing the new notebook. It is okay.

This morning I woke up and went to the coffee shop and wrote a passage that I suspect will make it into the final draft:

He felt a moment of unease, unsettling familiarity at that particular look of fear. He had seen it on a prostitute confronting her mistress behind the bars of the brothel; Enkō in the burning clearing as she tried to tell him what happened, as if she could; himself, in that room in the castle when he could speak the truth, but found himself trapped against the great, immovable boulder of authority which laid against the mountain so immense and a constant feature of his every living moment that when confronted and told—speak—to speak, he was being told to move that boulder with the knowledge that even if he managed to shift a single pebble beneath it, the boulder would simply roll over and crush him. Umehito knew that look of fear.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is one of the longest sentences I believe I have ever written.

Meanwhile, I am updating a new page, Curios, on Japanese charms called omamori. I have been promising myself for years that I would photograph my collection and share them online. This little boar is not officially in the collection. A friend of mine found him at a yard sale. He appears to be a bell, but at some point he was broken and lost the jangle inside that makes him jingle and then was glued back together. But, he is still a boar nonetheless!